In the past five blogs of the ‘Ask the Articulate trainer’ series, I have answered your questions about the entire Articulate 360 suite. In the fifth and final instalment of the series, I am going to answer your final questions on Articulate Storyline, planning and collaboration.

Q: How can I edit a motion path in Storyline?

A: You can use the Path Options drop down to make changes to the behaviour of your motion paths, such as direction or speed. In Storyline 360 you can also rename a motion path and adjust its size and position on screen (for line and shape motion paths). If you have drawn a custom path, and want to change the route of the path, you do need to delete it and start again.

Q: I would like to turn an interactive task usually played with cards into an online module. The task is a time line over 100 years and participants have events that they need to place on a timeline, there are around 25 dates. Is there any way of translating it into Articulate Storyline at all?

A: Yes, this is possible using Storyline. I’d create a background graphic to represent the 100-year timeline and create a drag & drop where you can place events at intervals across the timeline. You may also need to look at using at creating a scrolling effect where the timeline can move across the screen. Try looking at these ‘parallax effects’ posts on the eLearning Heroes community.

Q: What is the best way to plan/design a course in Articulate?

A: Planning is key to a successful eLearning course. At Cursim, Omniplex’s learning design division, we create courses for clients following the Backwards Design Process. Once we have scoped the project and decided on a visual design for the course, we work through the following steps:

Identify learning outcomes (objectives/required results)

Create assessments to test those outcomes

Build practice exercises

Create required knowledge

Create introductions/overviews

All of these stages are storyboarded and reviewed and signed off by the client before we start to actually build the project in our chosen tool. Reviewing and signing off at every stage is key to completing a project, otherwise it’s easy to keep going in circles by changing and adding content endlessly.

Q: Will future developments of Articulate 360 enable multiple editors to access, edit and work on Articulate projects?

A: The development roadmap from Articulate is a closely guarded secret! Even as a partner organisation we’d don’t get to see much further ahead than the average user sees through eLearning Heroes and the “Coming Soon” sneak peeks on the ‘What’s New’ page of the Articulate Website.

However, I do know that Storyline and Studio have always been desktop apps and I can’t see that changing anytime in the immediate future. Rise, however, has collaborative authoring available now.

I hope you found this blog useful, but if you do have any more questions, please feel free to contact me. If you’d like to catch up on the previous instalments of ‘Ask the Articulate Trainer’ you can find them here.